Tighten This! Challenge Sentence 58 [writing/editing game]

Welcome to the concise-writing game, Tighten This! Here’s Challenge Sentence 59, courtesy of Michelle Philbrook in a blog post complete with a video showing how she’d tighten the sentence.

In this tutorial you’ll find a demonstration of techniques for eliminating preposition bloat through the process of editing your writing with care in a short amount of time when you’re under the pressure of a deadline.

Your revision: _______________________
[Scroll to the bottom and put your revision in a comment by Friday, July 29.]

Last Week’s Challenge Sentence

In case you’re playing this game for the first time (welcome!), or in case you’ve had other things on your mind since you read the previous Challenge Sentence, here it is again:

Often, the focus is on transferring meaning and vocabulary, so much so that the tone of the target text is lost by the time the translation is finished.

Read on to hear thoughts from the game’s three judges: Larry Kunz (a seasoned technical writer and blogger who has participated in this game from the beginning), Ray (my husband), and me.

Larry’s Pick (Larry Kunz speaking)

OK. It was week 57. As in 57 Varieties. So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the variety. Our submissions this week show a variety of approaches to solving the problems posed by the Challenge Sentence.

I liked every one of them. Where the original sentence had a perfectly fine word—tone—our intrepid wordsmiths found more colorful ones, like sentiment and feelings.

I especially liked the submissions that moved translation (or translators) closer to the beginning of the sentence. In the original, we’re left until almost the end to guess what topic is being discussed. Granted, we don’t have that in its original context—which might’ve made it clear that we were talking about translation.

In our game it’s rare for an eleventh-hour submission to claim the top prize, especially in a week with so many strong contenders. But my top prize winner is Marguerite, who zeroed in on the topic—literal translations—and trimmed the sentence down to just 5 words. Great job!

Leigh! We haven’t seen a fresh berry at the farmers’ markets for weeks, and the good peaches are still a week away. If we find some local tomatoes this weekend, I’ll bake you a James Beard tomato pie.

Translators often lose the tone by focusing on meaning and vocabulary.

Marcia’s Pick (Marcia Johnston speaking)

Is, is, is. Three be-verbs. Yikes.

Before: Often, the focus is on transferring meaning and vocabulary, so much so that the tone of the target text is lost by the time the translation is finished.

After: Translators often neglect tone.

I would go this far because translators, by definition, “transfer meaning and vocabulary”; we don’t need any part of that phrase. Marguerite came closest, taking home this week’s laurels for this gem. (See above; Larry had the same opinion.)

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Again, Challenge Sentence 59

In this tutorial you’ll find a demonstration of techniques for eliminating preposition bloat through the process of editing your writing with care in a short amount of time when you’re under the pressure of a deadline.

Your revision: _______________________
[Scroll to the bottom and put your revision in a comment by Friday, July 29.]

However, the term “preposition bloat” bothers me. The likely audience for such a tutorial probably hasn’t heard the term before and may not be able to figure out what it means (I had to look up the term, so I guess I’m part of that audience). Here is an alternative that defines the term:

“Do you have preposition bloat–that queasy feeling you get when prepositional phrases take over your writing? If so, this tutorial shows you how to find and eliminate the problem quickly.”

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